


Waking Up Is Harder

by bibliothekara, melliyna



Category: Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Supernatural Elements, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 18:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliothekara/pseuds/bibliothekara, https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Down at Whitechapel station, they never get the normal cases. Ever. So rescuing their DI from a supernatural water being, kind of par for the course. Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking Up Is Harder

**Author's Note:**

> * Title from Terry Pratchett and "The Wee Free Men": 'The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.' (I swear I wrote the last line of this without consciously remembering that quote...-b)  
> *Inspired by the legends of the Sirens and the Lorelei and other such critters.

**_First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. /“The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.”_ **  
  
_She's beguiling, oh Miles can see that. Even on a rainy night in winter, he can see it; and snatches of time spent reading old myths in school a long long time ago run through his head. She's old, of a Thames and an England that he has never known. And she's got Joe, right there on the edge of the river.  
  
She speaks. It's a voice that so soft, and yet he can hear it as clear as a bell from 20 yards away._

_"Come in, come in Joseph. Come beneath the waves. I can free you, beautiful man. You can make an end."  
_

_And oh, oh just for a moment Miles hears the call. But he's steadied by the people on the land, the people he'd leave._

_Joe, Miles thinks sadly, doesn't have that. Because, at base Joseph Chandler has never thought he's worth having anchors. And that, that's why Joe slides in to the water._

_And because it's not bloody true, Miles dives in after him, half remembered prayers and definitely remembered curses upon his lips.  
  
Because you can't take a soul, he thinks, if that soul is loved. You can't take him to the water if he is loved and wanted._

*************  
The case hadn't felt right from the start, Riley thought. She shook her head as she closed her coat against the fog and the damp. Waiting and watching.  
  
It hadn't felt right. She had a sense about these things, Megan Riley did. It skipped a generation, as she reflected on it. Her mother was an entirely sensible woman. Never held with any of this intuitive stuff.  Annie Riley had raised 2 children, and then when her husband (Megan's father) had buggered off, round about when Megan was 13, Annie didn't miss a beat. Went out and got her certificate, became the best bloody CPA Golder's Green had ever seen.  
  
It skipped generations, it did, the sense. Megan remembered her Nan, on Mum's side, Nanny Martin. Entirely sensible nan, as nans went. But always had the touch of the preternatural about her.  
  
Maybe that's where Megan got it. And damn if it hadn't helped her get where she was today. Because there was the 95% of this job that was rational, sensible police work. Following the logic.  
  
And then there was the 5% that wasn't. The realm of hunches, and gut feeling, and...other things.  
  
Though her team seemed to live in that realm more than most, for better or for worse.

She looked down at Kent and Mansell, desperately trying to bring their DI back to the land of the living. Mansell pumping desperately on the Guv's chest; young Kent waiting to give breath once more.  
  
All four of them waiting for the EMTs to get there, to make their way down from the river road to the sodden shores. Megan had made the call, and then stood there. Feeling nothing so much as in between. Useless, as she watched her Guv…her Joe…slip away.  
  
And so she did the only other obvious thing; edging over to put her arm over Ray Miles's shivering shoulders.  
  
 (She stood about a head taller than the Detective Sergeant, but he'd never held it against her. Never held that fact against her, anyway, though there were plenty of others to work with. And he had, at least at first. She had joked with the Guv once that 'long suffering annoyance' seemed to be Ray Miles's default position.)  
  
There was nothing default, nothing usual about tonight though.  
  
It had been a series of disappearances, near the river. Disappearances but only the one body. It was the last body,  Geoffrey Norris; that had started them  on this backwards path in the first place.

Young men, mostly, but a few young women. No apparent victimology, as Buchan might have put it (he'd been studying American government documents).  
  
And it had all lead back to one woman. Laura. German immigrant; a hostess at one of the pubs near the river. They'd brought her in, and out, and in again, several times. Never managing to get a handle on her. There'd been something off, something her Nan might have called fey.  
  
But Laura'd got a handle on them, that was plain to see. She'd gotten her claws into Joe Chandler, clearest of all. The sweet boy (though she'd never let him hear her say that), too vulnerable, too apt. After Mina, after Morgan especially… It was one of those things you didn't know you'd seen coming until it was too late.  
  
There had been that one last reported disappearance. That one last phone call to the incident room, with the Guv arranging a solo meet with Laura (oh bloody hell). Vowing fire and brimstone to anyone who disobeyed his orders. (Or at least a Joe Chandler version of fire and brimstone, which was Pratchett-esque on the best of days.)  
  
The rest of the team might of been bowed by it. But Ray Miles? Never.    
  
"Bloody hell if I'm letting him go down there alone. And if anyone asks, you followed me, just out curiosity."  
  
And so they had. So they had, to watch Miles dragging the Guv out of the Thames on to the shore. Like a Yorkie dragging a Greyhound, it had been. Megan would have laughed, if her heart hadn't been at her throat at the time.  
  
(The official story later would be that DI Chandler dove into the river to effect a water rescue. And was caught in the current. None of them believed that.)  
  
A pressure leaning against her side brought Megan back to reality. It  was Ray Miles's inner battery letting him down entirely. His head leaning against her shoulder, his eyes pointing every which way.  
  
She had to say something. "It's okay, skip. They'll bring him back. They'll bring him back to us."  
  
"They'd better. Or I swear to god, I will follow after him to Hades myself and drag him back."  
  
"Well, that would scare the life into me, and no mistake."  
  
Miles caught her eye, and seemed like he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  
  
Fortunately, he didn't have to decide, because at that moment, a harsh cough broke the eerie riverside silence. The Guv, convulsing, retching river water and muck and clear fluid. And then breathing, inhaling like he'd take in all of Whitechapel in one breath.  But breathing.  
  
Miles ducked out from under her arm, kneeling by Joe's side. A mix of anger and relief and sheer bloody-minded affection on his face.  Kneeling by the DI's head, Ray whispered something under his breath that Megan couldn't quite hear.  
  
But she could read lips, a little. Or maybe it was that sense again, that let her know what Ray was saying.  
  
"Not today. They don't take you. Not today."  
  
Laura may have been something, something not quite right. Possessed some sort of magic that most police of Whitechapel had forgot, if they ever knew.  
  
But it wasn't enough to overcome what Ray Miles believed in. To overcome what bound Ray and Emerson Kent and Finlay Mansell and Ed Buchan and Joe Chandler and Megan Riley together.  
  
A blood magic, stronger than anything.  
  
A magic that said, 'This is my tribe. By blood and love and purpose. And I will defend what is mine.'  
  
 ***fin***


End file.
